[v. kuh
m-pres; n. kom-pres] 
| 1. | to press together; force into less space. |
| 2. | to cause to become a solid mass: to compress cotton into bales. |
| 3. | to condense, shorten, or abbreviate: The book was compressed by 50 pages. |
| 4. | Medicine/Medical. a soft, cloth pad held in place by a bandage and used to provide pressure or to supply moisture, cold, heat, or medication. |
| 5. | an apparatus for compressing cotton bales. |
| 6. | a warehouse for storing cotton bales before shipment. |
| com·press (kəm-prěs') tr.v. com·pressed, com·press·ing, com·press·es
[Middle English compressen, from Old French compresser, from Late Latin compressāre, frequentative of Latin comprimere : com-, com- + premere, to press; see per-4 in Indo-European roots.] |
compress com·press (kŏm'prěs')
n.
A soft pad of gauze or other material applied with pressure to a part of the body to control hemorrhage or to supply heat, cold, moisture, or medication to alleviate pain or reduce infection. v. com·pressed, com·press·ing, com·press·es (kəm-prěs')
To press or squeeze together.
compress
1. To feed data through any compression algorithm.
2.
Unix compress was written in C by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods et al., and was widely circulated via Usenet. It uses the Lempel-Ziv Welch algorithm and normally produces files with the suffix ".Z".
Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine-bit codes are output until they are all used. When this occurs, ten-bit codes are used and so on, until an implementation-dependent maximum is reached.
After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is checked. If it is decreasing then the entire string table is discarded and information is collected from scratch.
